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November 15, 2018

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A cure for kids’ myopia or academic achievement?

As a fifth-grader, I became one of only three students in my class to wear glasses. That was around 2003 when nearsightedness among children was not so serious an issue for educators.

This year a report issued by the Ministry of Education shows that more than 100 million elementary and middle school students in China have myopia.

According to a recent WHO report, the rate of nearsightedness among Chinese primary school students, nearly 40 percent, is the highest in the world. In contrast, only 10 percent of the American primary and middle school students have this problem. To curb nearsightedness among children, in August the Ministry of Education and the National Health Commission teamed up with six other ministry-level departments to launch an action plan.

The action plan sets forth the responsibilities of government departments and stresses cooperation between schools, local health departments and parents. The plan calls for cutting down on homework and exams, restricting children’s time spent on electronic devices, increasing outdoor activities and establishing eyesight profiles for students. The action plan aims to reduce the overall myopia rate among teenagers by more than 0.5 percent every year from 2018 to 2023. The plan says that by 2030, the nearsightedness rate among primary school students should be capped at 38 percent.

From 2019, progress on battling children’s myopia will become part of the criteria for evaluating school and government performance. I recently talked to some teachers and students from elementary and middle schools in Shanghai and Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, to hear their opinions about the plan.

Li, a high school teacher in Suzhou, claimed no knowledge of it and said at the moment exam scores still trump concerns about eye care. Declining to give her full name, Li pointed out that “reducing schoolwork just for the sake of improving eyesight is unrealistic.”

The word “just” says a lot: Children’s failing eyesight is often not so serious an issue as academic performance.

There is no obvious relief for students’ eyesight decline amid increasingly fierce academic competition. Compared to my school days, children are now exposed to a variety of extracurricular activities detrimental to their eyesight, such as increasing online one-on-one courses.

A ninth-grader from Shanghai told me recently that she is taking online courses with “star tutors” after 12 hours a day at school. She now uses eye drops due to her poor eyesight, a result of two hours in front of a computer screen every day. I also remember how students I used to teach at a middle school in Suzhou neglected eyesight protection. During the daily eye exercise, they just chatted away while the music played.

One of my former students explained eye exercises and physical activities are of little use, as they hardly affect their grades. According to the action plan, inclination, if not addiction, to electronic devices is also to blame. All the teachers I interviewed conceded that teaching now relies almost 100 percent on computers, projectors and other electronic devices.

At the Suzhou school where Li teaches, students are allowed to use tablets in classrooms to “meet international standards in searching for information.”

Li complained her students couldn’t do without tablets. Twenty-two out of 29 students in her class wear glasses.

“I find it absurd that the school has banned cellphones, but left the door open to tablets,” she said.

In late September, Shandong Provincial Education Department banned cellphones and tablets from primary and middle schools. They also require that they confiscate students’ gadgets during school hours to protect their eyesight.

Li told me she expected her school to follow suit, because banning the use of cellphones and tablets is a lot easier than forbidding teachers from using digital teaching tools. Another teacher surnamed Zhu, a head teacher at a private middle school in Suzhou, raised her concerns about evaluating schools and local education authorities by myopia rate.

She said her school hadn’t worked with local health institutes or created eyesight profiles for students.

“But I do think it is difficult to quantify success in curbing nearsightedness and the outcome is highly unpredictable,” said Zhu.

Predictably, the ministry’s action plan and local regulations can alleviate children’s nearsightedness in the short run, but only when our educators and parents put children’s health and happiness ahead of academic excellence can the myopia rate among children expect to significantly go down.




 

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